OK, I finally noodled this out. I have two inputs to my desktop monitor, so when I set up the pi, I can go back and forth between the console session with hardwire to monitor, keyboard and mouse, and the remote session from my Windows desktop. I could see that when connecting via VNC, the remote session was not identical to the console session I see when on the hardwire connection. So, what I think was happening was that when I first booted the pi, the pi would boot to desktop and auto log on pi as the user. When I then connected via SSH and ran vncserver, a second session would start, that was not the console session, and that was the conflict. I briefly attempted to have the pi boot to cli instead of desktop, but when that didn't immediately work, I set it back to boot to desktop. Instead of connecting via SSH and running vncserver for another session, I instead went directly to my VNC viewer and connected without the :1 at the end of the network address. Voila! it worked. I connected to the console session, now have JRiver auto launch at boot, and I can see and control JRiver.